Cops are stepping up their game, moving from both distribution and then harassment of communities for drugs, to drug production itself!
Florida’s Broward County is poised to erase the criminal convictions of thousands of people who were arrested for purchasing drugs, particularly crack cocaine. Why, you may ask? Did the holiday season lead Broward county’s Supreme Court to suddenly grow a heart, Grinch-style, realizing punitive measures to address drug use and addiction will never help people? No, it’s because it was found that those drugs were produced by the cops themselves in the Sheriff’s office. You sure did read that right. As reported by Democracy Now, “For years, the Broward County Sheriff’s Office produced crack cocaine to be sold by undercover police to the public.” The cops in Florida produced their own crack cocaine, then sold it to the public who they then targeted for arrest.
This ridiculous practice was ruled to be a violation of the state’s constitution in 1993 by Florida’s Supreme Court, calling the practice “outrageous.” Yet despite this ruling, these charges were allowed to stay on victims’ criminal records leading to long-term impacts including trouble finding housing and employment, destroying thousands of lives. Now, many years later, victims will have their convictions erased.
And this was by no means an isolated incident. Cops themselves have often been implicated in the distribution of drugs in communities throughout the United States. Whether it is fentanyl smuggled into the U.S. to be sold in bulk, assisting drug traffickers in distributing cocaine, or systematic drug money theft, the same cops who claim to be waging a “war on drugs” are often either drug pushers themselves or look to directly benefit from the sale of illicit drugs in communities across the United States.
Those institutions that claim to care about punitively addressing the spread of illicit drugs throughout the U.S. are often the same ones involved in spreading them, at worst, and turning a blind eye, at best. We have seen many examples of this even in “higher-level” organizations in the past — whether Gary Webb’s reporting showing the “Dark Alliance” around the CIA backed contra drug trafficking in the 80s which, it’s proposed, helped lead to the explosion of crack cocaine distribution in California or even former DEA agent Michael Levine’s coverage in The Big White Lie.
Despite data showing punitive approaches to illicit substances (if we want to accept the false argument that certain substances should be illegal in the first place) are actually harmful, rhetoric around the drug war continues to escalate. As the U.S. faces an ongoing overdose crisis, president-elect Donald Trump has nonsensically threatened to increase tariffs by 25 percent on Canada and Mexico saying, “This Tariff will remain in effect until such time as Drugs, in particular Fentanyl, and all Illegal Aliens stop this Invasion of our Country!” He went on to threaten China with an additional 10 percent tariff on top of any existing tariffs until it somehow magically prevents the flow of fentanyl into the United States.
As we have written, there can be no capitalist solution to the overdose crisis. The recent news from Broward County further underscores that not only are the cops useless in addressing the crisis, they’re often pushing drugs themselves. The poor and working class need their own solutions to the crisis, and those will not come through tariffs that will only hurt the working class in the U.S. or the ongoing War on Drugs.